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If you live or work with anybody, you'll want to read this article. It explains so much about how we react to people and events.

The calm temperament is not superhuman, nor is it entirely the gift of the chosen few. It can be cultivated, even as the world cleaves around us.

So how do we get there without a steady diet of beta blockers and Xanax? Calm, per se, doesn’t appear in the taxonomy of those who study personality and temperament. People we might colloquially describe as calm are classified as low on the scale of neuroticism — a scale everyone is measured on, to a greater or lesser degree.

How much neuroticism anyone gets is determined largely by genetics. But it is also within our control. Psychiatrists and psychologists talk about emotional regulation — the ability to manage neuroticism so that even the most nervous of people can go through life appearing and feeling more in control than those genetically predisposed to calmness.

Click here to read the rest of The Cool Factor: Never Let Them See You Sweat.